The city of Oxyrhynchus is in central Egypt, south of Cairo, west of the Nile, and bears its Greek name from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquest in 332 BC. In 1896, two young classicists from Oxford University, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, came to Oxyrhynchus to excavate the ancient, undisturbed rubbish mounds circling the city.
What Grenfell and Hunt found when they started digging would occupy them for most of the rest of their lives: thousands of Greek and Latin documents from the 1st century to the 6th. Whether in whole or in part, there were works by Pindar, Sappho, Euripides, Euclid and countless others. There were fragments of early non-canonical Gospels, parts of Matthew, the First Epistle of John and an entire work, Against Heresies, by the Church Father Irenaeus. In the words of Grenfell himself: “The flow of papyri soon became a torrent. Merely turning up the soil with one’s boot would frequently disclose a layer.”
The torrent continued for years and in 1918 it delivered what has come to be known as the Oxyrhynchus hymn, a fragment written in Greek at around the end of the 3rd century, making it contemporary with some of the earliest New Testament papyri. It is thought to be the oldest known manuscript of Christian music and takes the form of a frayed, faded, irregular strip of papyrus, around a foot in length, containing the conclusion only of the hymn. On the other side is a column of accounts relating to corn, written earlier in the same century.
The words of the hymn appear as long lines running parallel with the fibres, in a clear, upright hand. Above each line, in more cursive lettering, have been added the corresponding vocal notes. (Grenfell and Hunt found it difficult to determine whether the words and the notes had been written by the same scribe or two different people.)
The lyrics are not easy to decipher, with four of the five lines disfigured by gaps. Nevertheless, while there have been scholarly differences of view, the general purport seems clear and translation is possible. The hymn appears to call for Creation at large, the very cosmos itself, to fall silent while we, the worshippers, praise the Holy Trinity:
Let the rushings of winds, the sources of all surging rivers cease. While we hymn Father and Son and Holy Spirit, let all the powers answer, “Amen, amen, strength, praise, and glory forever to God, the sole giver of all good things. Amen, amen.
As Professor Charles H Cosgrove has noted, the voice of the hymn is self-referential, singing about its own singing, while locating this singing in the here and now. The call for cosmic stillness, he writes, was well established in older Greek liturgy, drama and hymnody. For Paul Henry Lang, these few words and notes offered a demonstration of “the uninterrupted continuity that existed between ancient and Christian Greek civilisation. It testifies to the fact that the educated Christian Greeks accepted and transplanted the musical system of their ancestors.”
Meanwhile, the “powers” who answer the Trinitarian hymn with a doxology are, in Prof Cosgrove’s judgment, most likely to be the angels traditionally thought of as worshipping God around the heavenly throne. This links the hymn to traditions of Jewish worship: “During the Second Jewish Commonwealth, notions of heavenly worship carried out by thousands of angelic beings … flourished in the minds of Jewish authors. People naturally thought about the relationship between earthly worship in the Jewish temple and angelic worship in the heavenly temple.”
To hear what the Oxyrhynchus hymn might have sounded like, readers might search out the performance contained in the superb 2010 BBC documentary Sacred Music at Christmas (where it is used to illustrate the sheer antiquity of Christian music-making rather than music associated with the feast itself). Set against beautiful vistas of the Nile at sunset, the presenter, renowned actor and former chorister Simon Russell Beale joins Harry Christophers, founder and conductor of the choir The Sixteen, and baritone Eamonn Dougan in a spine-tingling reconstruction of the ancient song.
Beale and Christophers also visit the Sackler Library in Oxford to see the fragment itself. They meet associate professor of papyrology, Dirk Obbink, a successor of Grenfell and Hunt who both went on to hold this post. Prof Obbink remarks of the Oxyrhynchus project as a whole: “We’ve published so far over 5,000 pieces. We reckon that is about one per cent and that there are at least another 500,000. We expect there to be more of this hymn, but we just haven’t found it yet.”
Beale draws things to a wistful conclusion: “After the time of the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, the Greek musical notation it preserves was lost. Nothing musical would be written down for six hundred years.”
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